When She Is Paper
by Wings-of-Sapphire
Summary: They said goodbye with a note so many years ago. She was a girl made of paper and she forgave them. She wears a delicate mask now as she meets them again as someone new. A girl made of steel. Technical sequel to When She Writes.


**Okay! So, sequel to When She Writes! You don't have to have read that story to understand what is happening in this one though, and I _will _have a funny one-shot coming out soon because the ones that I have posted so far have been pretty serious and/or depressing. But until then, please enjoy this blast from the past :)**

**Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto or any of the characters used in this story**

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They are a Golden Team as she remembers it. They are living legends.

And what was she but a piece of paper?

It had been so many years now.

Too many years.

She was old. Not of body, but of mind. Of soul. Weathered the antique brown of parchment left to the wind and dust and rain. But her lips turned upward in a smile as she watched from her perch. Noting the poetry of the scene. Titans were fighting. Battling. Trying to break one another, as they always did. Never noticing her presence. Never seeing her.

How nostalgic.

There had been a time before they left the village behind them that their oversight would have made her feel slighted. Forgotten. Unimportant. But she had learned so long ago that her worth should not be estimated by a group of men with the emotional sensitivity of the Hokage Mountain.

The earth shook as the Kyuubi vessel shouted some profanities at the last Uchiha. The copy nin would be on his way now. To stop this clash of beasts. Funny how things turned out.

She leaned her back against the rough bark of the tree as she watched an angel try to put his fist through a demon's chest. _Tsk, tsk, Naruto. You can do better than that. _

It had been so long since she had laid eyes on them. These two members of the Golden Team of Konohagakure. A team that had left her behind a millenia ago.

She supposed that she should leave before their former sensei arrives, although she doubted that he would notice her. He never had before. But as she heard them shout out battle cries that were essentially useless to their actual attacks, she couldn't seem to help herself. _Stay on mission, leave the scroll. You're too reminiscent, Sakura. It will be the death of you. _

But not today. She would not die today.

She shifted herself ever so slightly and as the boys charged each other, filled with foolhardy bravado, she appeared between them. A porcelain mask and a red scarf and a stranger to them. The forest erupted as their chakra was redirected into the ground, destroying everything that it touched. And all they could do was watch this impossible feat in stunned silence. One second and then the figure was across the field from them. As though it had been there the entire time, as though it hadn't done something so improbable.

A more childish side of herself wanted to be a bit more vindictive to the boys that had left her with nothing but a piece of paper on her night table and distant memories of lukewarm camaraderie.

Naruto still looked for her. Only sometimes though, when the wind was right and they were in a town that he could vaguely remember her saying that she liked. He tried to contact her then. His messages had reached her in the early days, letters that she never opened. The time had long since passed for her to move on. And as the months turned to years she moved from place to place and the letters stopped reaching her and she stopped waiting for them.

Sasuke would never admit that he had tried as well. The messenger birds he sent to her that didn't return and the silence that followed said more than her words could have. Mostly his notes were insults to try and get a rise out of her. But it was always more of the same.

Kakashi had inquired about her through the Hokage. Whose own silence in terms of her apprentice made him wary of what had become of his student. But these were mere moments in their lives. A blip on the radar that would disappear again after some time and more than a few rounds of sake.

She shifted herself to stand just far enough away that she could escape if need be. It was her way. Running. Always running. Not from something anymore, certainly not from these boys that she had depended on so completely as a child.

"Who_ are_ you?!_" _

Her eyes crinkled as she smiled at them. Not that they could see it from behind her mask. Her only defense against these people. It pleased her that they couldn't tell who she was. These boys that claimed to know her so well.

She inclined her head slightly to the right as she sensed her former sensei approaching a little too late. And there was he was. The final member of this team made of precious metal.

A breeze and silence and she could feel him there, aloof as always. Deceptively relaxed. Was this ANBU a threat or not? Konoha he would deduce, but no one that he knew. The beauty of time and forgetfulness knows no bounds in this aspect.

"Yare yare, how troubling a sight this is."

If she wasn't so busy thinking of how idiotic it had been for her to meet them she would have laughed at that statement. How troubling, indeed. Team 7 reunited without them ever having known it.

"This is pointless. What do you want, ANBU?"

She should have just left the damn scroll for them. But instead she had wanted to test herself. To see if she could look into the eyes of her former team and truly feel nothing. She was overjoyed and infinitely disappointed when she found eyes of obsidian and felt only the cool indifference that she had become so accustomed.

Tossing the mission statement to the older masked nin she wondered if there were anything else for her to say to these men, as they all gathered around the scroll to read the words that she had already memorized. They were to return to Konoha. The Golden Team was coming home.

And she recalls a girl of yesterday surrounded by paper and ink and thoughts that were never quite right in the written word.

A girl who had forgiven these idiots.

"Thank you, ANBU-san. Is there something else that you needed?"

Of course. She was supposed to have left by now. But as she scrutinized them beneath a deceptively fragile mask, she wondered how they could not see her. And she opens her mouth to answer him. To ask them if they know her.

And shuts it once again.

They do not know this girl. She was not Sakura. She was Byakko. And she did not know these men.

With a shake of her head she disappears.

They were made of gold.

And behind her porcelain mask she was steel.

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